What does life do when a meticulous planner like me becomes a bemused victim of my own folly? It takes it upon itself to transport me to a completely unpredictable fun mission which includes many firsts in my not-so-short life and, what more, makes me let my hair down and go with the flow.

Being stranded in an alien city, Chennai in this case, with close to nothing cash on me (Thanks to Mr.Modi) for eight long hours and the company of a person I barely knew for the duration of the flight wasn’t my idea of an adventure. Yet, I would give myself, and him, the credit for turning the proverbial lemons into lemonade (and a yummy one at that!). 😉 🙂

Once we (me and Monish, another blogger) had the itinerary of our return in place and our families back home were duly informed about it, we sent out feelers on social media requesting suggestions for must-visit places in the short time we had at our disposal (food and travel-time included). We decided to use the public transport to feel and explore the city.

Both of us Mumbaiites, but the Chennai heat hit us hard and took a bit of getting used to. Without delving into many details here though, let me tell you what we ended up doing. After asking people around for directions, from the airport we rode the Metro (which was sadly sparsely used) to CMBT and had our lunch at this famous restaurant called Saravana Bhavan.

Thanks Swaram for that drool-worthy dosa post of yours! I couldn’t dream of missing a dosa treat in Chennai. 😛

Monish’s friend, who was supposed to join us there, was running a bit late so we made an ad-hoc plan to take a bus-ride and go shopping at T Nagar. We had to make it quick to be in time for our flight, so we stopped only at Pothys and I bought these.

On our Metro journey we had seen a couple of beautiful temples and really wanted to visit one, but sadly that couldn’t happen since the Shiva Vishnu temple we were closest to was closed in the afternoon. Also, luckily for us, our fast depleting cash reserve didn’t pose much of a problem since we used plastic money wherever we could.

Most interesting and hilarious of all was the language barrier we faced everywhere. People gave us blank stares when we asked anything in Hindi and we returned them with an added puzzled expression when they responded in Tamil. 😀 Not everyone could use English, understandably, but I have to grant that no one denied us help. 🙂

All in all, this was a first-of-its-kind getaway of sorts for me where nothing was planned beforehand. I loved every bit of it! ❤